Like this:

Technically, Yuri and I didn’t finish this quilt until today, but I’m counting it on this Stash anyway. This will be the last report I’ll write for a while, because of my knee surgery, so I want to include this.

This is a leaders and enders quilt that I made blocks for during the last year. It’s very simple, two colors, because that’s about all I can handle for l and e. I need to think about the quilt I’m doing, so this has to be fool-proof. I have a lot of small scraps, but the main reason I do these is to eliminate starting and stopping threads in my regular piecing. This cleans things up a lot.

It was fun to revisit some of the fabrics in here. There are bits of peacock fabric from the 2008 Hoffman Challenge, and some from my nephew’s ocean-themed graduation quilt.

The quilting started with stitching in the ditch next to all the sashing using blue Bottom Line, so it’s nearly invisible. Then I used a gold and blue variegated So Fine (Superior) 40 wt. thread for all the other quilting. I used orange peel quilting on half the blocks, and free-hand spirals in the alternate blocks. The border has a series of wavy lines. I started that with the walking foot, but quickly switched back to free-motion quilting because it was much easier than turning the quilt for the walking foot, and, with the echo foot, seemed just as accurate.

This quilt is 62″ x 84″ (or it was before washing!). It used about 9.25 yards of fabric.

Bonus: Assembled Blue and Brown Leaders and Enders top and made a lot of quilting progress.

I finally just went up and hung that picture because I was too embarrassed to put it on the list one more time! The photograph I hung is of my great, great Aunt Maggie. She was Maggie Jane McMillen Mills (1864 -1916). She was a seamstress, along with her sister Francie, and I have always wanted her to watch over my studio. She made the dress she is wearing, which I wish you could see better, because it’s very elaborate in the front. This very heavy portrait is behind curved glass, and I found it almost impossible to photograph, try as I might. The background is completely plain, everything you see is reflection. The background was tinted a rose tone, as were her lips. I think some of the dress details were drawn in to help them show up against the dark dress.

Anyway, Aunt Maggie is finally in her spot, and that corner behind the door has been cleaned up!